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Mosque in Broken Hill

Bob Shamroze is raking leaves under the date palms that shade the Afghan mosque which lies among the workshops, sheds and fibro cottages on the fringe of Broken Hill. He has already swept the watercourse where, as a boy, he helped wash and shroud his uncle for burial.

Elsewhere in town it is hot – one of those days when the bitumen is soft underfoot – but under the palms it is more comfortable, and inside the little corrugated-iron rust-red mosque it is surprisingly cool.

“Sometimes I just come here to sit and think for a bit,” says Bob, who was born Ammin Nullah Shamroze.

Afghan legacy in Broken Hill

The mosque, the oldest in NSW, was built at Broken Hill's cameleer camp in 1891, and moved some years later to its current location.

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Bob's father, Shamroze Khan, and two of his uncles were among the last cameleers to drive their camel trains from Broken Hill, bringing supplies to the frontier mines and grazing lands.

Bob Shamroze remembers as a child there was some division between those who were known as Afghan, but in truth came from parts of modern day Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, and their European neighbours. Perhaps, he says, because teamsters driving bullocks lost work to the cameleers.

“No one else could do it, no one else could get the supplies out in those conditions,” Shamroze says.

But by the time of what became known as the New Year's Day massacre in Broken Hill in 1915, the cameleers' loyalty lay with the townsfolk.

Incensed by Australia's involvement in Britain's Turkish campaign, Mullah Abdullah, an imam and butcher thought to have been 61 at the time, and the ice-cream vendor Badsha Mahommed Gool, thought to have been 41, ambushed the annual picnic train from Broken Hill to Silverton.

They shot dead four people – including one man who caught a stray bullet when he refused to stop chopping firewood during the gunfight – before police killed them.

Shamroze remembers how his father and uncles spoke of the police bringing the two muslim men to the mosque later for preparation for a burial. The cameleers refused and the men were eventually buried in an unmarked grave.

Today, the Afghan mosque opens weekly for curious visitors, but Shamroze, who was not raised as muslim, keeps a key on him to open it any time the passing faithful need a place to pray.